StoryCo Host on the Enduring Power of Narratives

Content is one thing. Stories are something else entirely

Perhaps every generation gets the communication crisis it deserves. Ours built computers that generated infinite content, and then we realized too late that volume and meaning are not the same thing. We are producing more words, images, audio and video than at any point in human history. We’re relentlessly swiping, ceaselessly scrolling and drowning in noise. Most of it says nothing that matters … and I think the crisis is one of story. So, when Jago Lee at Tell Tale Productions invited me to host StoryCo—a podcast about the evolution and business of storytelling—I leapt at the opportunity.

Much of the discourse around AI misses the mark when conversation fixates on what machines can do, like write copy, generate images and simulate voices. Amid so much automation, the human residue bit becomes the valuable thing. And what is most irreducibly human is the capacity to build a narrative that someone else feels in their chest or gives us goosebumps.

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Story is not “content” and it never was. In fact, story was survival for early humans. Tribal elders who could explain why the river flooded or the harvest failed were not providing entertainment. They were orienting with mythology and early technology, passing hard-won knowledge across generations in a form that stuck. That’s because the brain did not evolve to process data; rather, it preferred to follow a protagonist through difficulty toward some resolution.

That is the architecture we are working with today and nothing about it has changed. What has changed is the battlefield. I have spent my career watching the industry chase the new thing: social platforms, second screens, streaming wars, the creator economy, the metaverse, algorithms. Each wave promised to rewrite the rules of audience and attention. Some did, but I kept noticing that stories themselves lasted, not necessarily the platforms. The methods of distribution morphed but the underlying human need stayed stubbornly the same.

Political power now runs almost entirely on narrative mechanics. Trump did not win two elections on policy. He won them on story. Conspiracy culture uses the same engine, just calibrated differently. In sport, the best clubs are selling a mythology. From football terraces to fiction forums, fandom is just collective storytelling at scale. PR at its best is narrative management. And brand strategy, when it works, has always been story architecture. The most commercially durable brands are not product companies. Rather, they are story companies. Audiences have never been more sophisticated at detecting the difference between the two.

And yet, we have never invested seriously in teaching people how to do this. Storytelling gets name-checked in every strategy deck. But rarely does it get properly taught. The craft, architecture and mechanics of why certain stories land and others dissolve are treated as instinctive rather than a discipline. That’s a significant error and it is getting more expensive by the week. So, this StoryCo podcast perhaps exists because of that gap.

Each episode goes deep with someone who has built something remarkable through the power of story. We chat with theorists, writers, producers, executives, artists. The series opens with the incredible John Yorke, former drama head at Channel 4 and author of Into the Woods, perhaps most rigorous book on narrative structure written in English. He takes the conversation from the tribal origins of storytelling straight through to Trump, political discourse and the mechanics of narrative shaping power.

The argument of the show fits on the back of a napkin. Fittingly. In a world of automated content, the ability to just communicate a meaningful story is the skill. The attention economy gave way to the engagement economy and what comes next is the story economy, where the scarcest resource is not reach, but real resonance. Shivers and goosebumps born from humans telling stories.

We are all living inside someone else’s narrative. The question is whether you know how to build your own.